How to Install WordPress on Google Cloud Compute

Let’s go ahead and connect a Google Cloud Compute VM Instance to SpinupWP. Before you start this process, you will need to sign up for a Google Cloud Platform account if you don’t already have one.

Once signed in, navigate to Compute Engine > VM Instances and click Create. When adding a new VM instance via Google Cloud Platform:

  1. Enter a name for the server
  2. Select the region where the server will be hosted
  3. Select a machine type, which will determine how many sites you can host on the server and the amount of traffic it will be able to handle. Check out our Server Size doc if you need more help selecting a machine type
  4. Select Ubuntu 24.04 LTS as the boot disk. You may also want to increase the boot disk size, depending on the size of your sites
  5. Enable both HTTP and HTTPS to ensure web traffic can pass through the firewall

All other options can be configured as required, or left as their default values.

Google Cloud create instance

Once the server has been created, copy the external IP address and click SSH. This will open a terminal connection via your browser.

Google Cloud instance list

The SSH console will connect using the default SSH user which is generated from your Google Cloud account email address. For example, if your email is alex@acmepublishing.com, the SSH username will be alex. We’ll use this user to provision the server.

Head over to SpinupWP and click Spin Up a New Server followed by I’ve already provisioned a fresh server. Enter the server’s external IP address, SSH username and select Public Key authentication.

SpinupWP provision server

Copy the command provided by SpinupWP into the browser terminal connection.

Google Cloud Browser Terminal

Confirm the connection by clicking Next in SpinupWP. Enter the server’s hostname and select the desired database server. Click Provision Server to begin the provisioning process.

SpinupWP Provisioning

Once the server has finished provisioning you’re ready to start adding sites or other web apps.

Next steps

To continue your setup and add a site, see our Getting Started doc.

What to expect after adding a site? You’ll have the option to configure your server and sites to your needs via the SpinupWP dashboard.

You’ll be able to quickly enable page caching. When enabled, SpinupWP configures full page caching, essentially turning your site into a static site and dramatically improving the load time of your site.

You can also toggle on an SSL certificate to enable HTTPS. This generates a free Let’s Encrypt certificate so you don’t have to manually manage this yourself. If you’d prefer to use a custom SSL certificate, you’ll have the opportunity to upload that instead.

If you’re looking to add rewrite rules or prevent PHP scripts from being executed in the uploads folder, the Nginx settings steps will cover that.

We’ll also cover enabling SFTP & SSH access to your site and setting up site backups.

SpinupWP can take care of automated daily site backups which include full backups of your site files (media, themes and plugins). You’ll have the option to backup to Amazon S3, DigitalOcean Spaces, Akamai/Linode, Google Cloud Storage, Wasabi or Backblaze B2.

Follow our Getting Started Guide for step by step instructions for all of the above mentioned features and more.